Wednesday, July 21, 2010

What's your name?

So I went to play Killer Pizza yesterday and found out that a girl in my class didn't have a name yet.

First things first, Killer Pizza is a super easy game in which you draw a circle on the board and divide it into slices like you would a pizza. Then you label each slice with a player's name. Then you throw a sticky ball at the circle. Whoever it hits is out (dead if you will) and the two people on either side have to paper-scissor-stone (rock-paper-scissors for all you Americans and Canadians out there). The loser now has a larger piece of pizza because they are occupying their own slice plus the dead person's slice.

Ok that made it sound overly complicated, but it's not. It's super easy. However, you have to have a name. Well, an English name because this is English class after all.

So I'm going around asking each kid their name and writing them down. Some of them had names they couldn't even pronounce (Anderson sounded like Edison and Henry sounded like Eric...). I get to this little girl and she tells me her name in Chinese. I was like, "No, sweetie, your English name."

So we spent the next five minutes of class voting on what her English name should be.

I gave her a couple of options, all that I thought she could say easily, and then she (with the help of the class) finally landed on Leah.

So I finally got to name a kid, which was one of my goals in Taiwan. I'm pretty psyched about that.

In other news, (I know that was awful) I started telling my classes this week about leaving. Monday night my first class didn't really react because my boss told them in Chinese while we was talking to their parents because we had a demo. My second class wasn't shocked.

Tuesday was heartbreaking though. I had to tell me babies. The kids who have never had another foreign teacher but me (except while I was on vacation). At first they said they understood but no one said anything so Angela explained in Chinese just to make sure.

They all gasped and looked horrified.

I seriously started crying. I felt so bad. It was as if I were abandoning my children. Next week is going to be tough.